Create a Career Plan for the AI Age

1. Strengthen Your Human Capabilities

As AI tools become more powerful, distinctly human capabilities become increasingly valuable. Use AI as a tool to supplement and amplify your essential human abilities.

• Carefully plan your academic journey in college.
• Prepare yourself to succeed in a future of continual change.
• Use your AI skills in searching for jobs and internships.

Skills You Will Need

• Critical thinking: Analyzing complex situations; identifying bad assumptions, logical flaws and unreliable sources.
• Creativity and innovation: Generating novel ideas, solving problems in new ways, being comfortable with ambiguity, constructively challenging conventional wisdom.
• Emotional intelligence: Building empathy and strong listening skills, mastering confict resolution and negotiation, reading social dynamics, building intercultural competence, developing resilience and emotional self-regulation.
• Ethical judgment: Recognizing moral complexity, advocating for ethical considerations, setting personal ethical principles and boundaries.
• Strategic thinking: Seeing beyond immediate problems to broader implications, identifying emerging opportunities and threats, planning for scenarios and risks.
• Leadership and collaboration: Motivating a team, delegating and overseeing tasks, giving and receiving constructive feedback, building consensus and managing conflict.

How to Develop These Skills

• Cultivate mentors who can guide your development.
• Take classes or seminars focused on your personal and professional growth and development.
• Seek leadership roles in student and professional organizations.
• Join group, research and community projects.
• Make internships a priority in your education.

2. Become AI-literate

Findings from the 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report (PDF):

• 87% of employers say AI and big data skills are becoming more important.
• 86% of employers expect AI and related technologies will drive business transformation in the next five years.
• 69% of employers plan to recruit talent skilled in AI tool design and enhancement.
• 62% of employers anticipate focusing on hiring individuals with skills to work with AI.

Skills You Will Need

• Fundamental AI skills: Writing effective prompts, fact-checking AI output, combining outputs from multiple AI tools, writing and editing with AI, working ethically with AI.
• Technical understanding: Basic knowledge of how different types of AI work, understanding AI limitations and biases.
• Professional AI applications: Using AI tools specific to your field; information research, data analysis and visualization.
• AI integration: Creating workfows and documentation that combine AI and human input, protocols for quality control of AI output, keeping AI secure and guarding data privacy.

How to Develop These Skills

• Take courses focused on AI tools and applications.
• Get to know professors and mentors who can share what they know about AI.
• Complete AI certification programs.
• Build a portfolio of AI-assisted projects.
• Join AI professional organizations and student AI groups.

Adapted from the Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence (2025), developed by Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center in partnership with American Association of Colleges and Universities. Used with permission under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.